Africa Great Lakes Democracy Watch

Welcome toAfrica Great Lakes Democracy Watch Blog.Our objective is to promote the institutions of democracy,social justice,Human Rights,Peace, Freedom ofExpression, and Respect to humanity in Rwanda,Uganda,DR Congo, Burundi,Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya,Ethiopia, and Somalia. We strongly believe that Africa will develop if only our presidents stop being rulers of men and become leaders of citizens. We support Breaking the Silence Campaign for DR Congo since we believe the democracy in Rwanda means peace inDRC. Follow this link to learn more about the origin of the war in both Rwanda and DR Congo:http://www.rwandadocumentsproject.net/gsdl/cgi-bin/library

Friday, February 8, 2013

Rwanda-US: "U.S. trips in Rwanda prosecution Who to believe, when the African government uses genocide memories as political tool?

"U.S. trips in Rwanda prosecution

Who to believe, when the African government uses genocide memories as political tool?

During her rape by a militiaman, the nun screamed and spit at the face
of the woman they called "Commander Beatrice," the witness recounted
from the stand. "If you don't want to be like other women, let me take
you somewhere else," the militiawoman responded. She took the nun to an
open pit and shot her with a pistol.

The alleged rape and murder took place in Butare, Rwanda, during that
country's 1994 genocide. The testimony was by Jean-Damascene "Saddam"
Munyanyeza, a slight Rwandan wearing leg shackles and a blue work jacket
that looked three sizes too large. He spoke not before an international
tribunal, but through a translator to a federal jury in New Hampshire.
The defendant, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 41, was on trial not for murder or
genocide, but for immigration fraud.

Her trial was part of a multimillion-dollar effort by the U.S.
Department of Justice and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to
prosecute and deport U.S. residents suspected of involvement in Rwanda's
100-day slaughter, 18 years after it ended.

Only the government didn't succeed. The jury deadlocked, and U.S.
District Judge Steven McAuliffe declared a mistrial on March 15. It was
the second failed prosecution of someone accused of genocide during the
past year.

Although international legal experts and human rights groups have
praised the attempts to ensure justice for genocide victims, many
question whether witnesses like "Saddam," provided by Rwanda's
authoritarian, ethnic Tutsi-dominated government, are reliable. And
almost no one claims that once deported to Rwanda, defendants will face a
fair trial.

"The Rwandan government is making it impossible to tell false
accusations from real ones, because they use genocide allegations as a
political tool to silence dissent," said Brian Endless, a political
scientist at Loyola University Chicago who studies Rwanda and advised
Munyenyezi's defense.

Rwanda's government drew a different conclusion. "Some of these Western
jurisdictions can't just understand the gravity of cases before them,"
Martin Ngoga, the country's prosecutor general, told Rwanda's The New
Times following the mistrial. "They handle these cases in a very
simplistic way. We have, in the past, applauded trials abroad because we
thought they would substitute extradition. But this isn't happening;
some countries have abused this process."

Defense attorneys David Ruoff and Mark Howard argued much the same
point, but from the opposite perspective. "The approach that the federal
government has taken is to apply Western norms and carve out witnesses
from the heart of Africa and think the same norms will apply," Ruoff
said. "That just doesn't apply here, and the government hasn't addressed
that."

Carmen Ortiz, the Massachusetts U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted
the case, in a formal statement called the outcome "unfortunate" and
said the Justice Department was reviewing its options. The department
noted its successful immigration prosecutions in the past of suspected
former Nazis and people linked to massacres in Guatemala and Bosnia.

"The Justice Department is committed to ensuring that human rights
violators from any region of the world are not granted safe haven in the
United States," the department said. "As in every type of case, we
conduct thorough investigations and bring charges we believe are
supported by evidence sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction."

COMING TO AMERICA

Rwanda's genocide was preceded by four years of civil war between a
Hutu-dominated government and Tutsi guerrillas. The spark was the
shooting down of an airplane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana, a
Hutu, on April 6, 1994 — possibly by radical Hutus who feared he would
make peace with the rebels. For 100 days, Hutu extremists in Rwanda's
interim government directed soldiers and members of the Interahamwe
militia to slaughter an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus out
of a population of about 7 million people. The killings ended with the
Tutsi rebels seizing power. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled to
neighboring countries; several thousands of those who remained fell
victim to reprisal killings.

Munyenyezi and her three children moved to the United States in 1998.
Since the genocide, she had shuttled among refugee settlements in east
Africa, but once in this country found an apartment, a car and a job
with the Manchester Housing and Redevelopment Authority, where she
became an advocate for refugees, according to Manchester's New Hampshire
Union Leader. In 2003, she became a U.S. citizen in the same federal
courthouse where she later would stand trial. By that time, she'd bought
a home and was working on a memoir, Life In the Middle of Nowhere.

In 2005, she gave an interview about fleeing Rwanda. "I escaped, I
locked up my house," she told New Hampshire Public Radio. "At some
point, I thought I would go back in a few weeks, and I never knew that
it was for good. And you know, I left everything, especially my wedding
dress that I wish that I could have."

Munyenyezi's July 1993 marriage into a politically connected Hutu family
has proven problematic. Her husband, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, became a
feared Hutu militia leader during the slaughter. Her mother-in-law,
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, was the minister of women's affairs in the
government that oversaw the killings. Both were convicted for their
roles in the genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
and sentenced to life in prison.

In 2006 Munyenyezi, traveled to Tan­zania to testify during her
husband's trial; she told the court that Shalom hadn't participated in
any crimes. At about that time, her life in the United States had begun
to unravel; she lost her job to city budget cuts, according to the Union
Leader. By 2008, she was working as a nurse's aide, making less than
$1,000 a month. She declared bankruptcy and lost her home. That same
year, her sister, who had also testified in Tanzania, was indicted on 10
counts of perjury and immigration fraud for allegedly lying under oath
during her immigration proceedings about her membership in Habyarimana's
political party (which before the peace talks sanctioned persecution of
Tutsis).

According to Ruoff, immigration agents opened an investigation into
Munyenyezi after someone sent investigators a transcript of her tribunal
testimony.

Prosecutors Jon Capin and Aloke Chakravarty of the U.S. Attorney's
Office for the District of Massachusetts attempted to prove at trial
that Munyenyezi played a role in the genocide. Ruoff and Howard argued
in turn that the government's case was built on unreliable witnesses,
some of whom had admitted to mass murder themselves — "Saddam," for
example, testified that he couldn't recall how many children he'd
killed. They argued that Munyenyezi, who was pregnant with twins at the
time, sheltered with other female family members from the carnage around
her. Her relatives backed up that argument at trial, although eight
Rwandan prosecution witnesses insisted that she was deeply engaged in
the slaughter.

"It's the face I saw during the genocide, and it's a face I will never
forget," testified Aleysia Mukankuriza, who described surviving by
walking to Burundi despite a head wound. "A person who has done wrong to
you, you will never forget."

"Saddam" accused Munyenyezi not only of killing of the nun, but also of
procuring Tutsi girls to be raped, instructing him and other militiamen
to construct a roadblock and making a radio speech warning Hutus not to
shelter Tutsis.

By some estimates, as many as 80 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda
were murdered in three months. Killing at that scale requires the
participation of a wide swathe of the population. "I think anyone in
Rwanda at that time has some stain on them," said Susan Thomson, a
Hampshire College professor who has spent much of her career researching
the genocide, and who was listed as an expert witness for Munyenyezi's
defense but did not testify.

INVOLVEMENT NEVER MENTIONED

Munyenyezi's lawyers noted that in hundreds of pages of testimony before
the international tribunal and in reports by Human Rights Watch and
other groups, Munyenyezi's involvement is never mentioned, including by
witnesses who would later testify at her trial. Moreover, a growing body
of evidence suggested that the Rwanda's government is using genocide
allegations to silence exiled political opponents and discourage defense
witnesses from coming forward — as Munyenyezi did for her husband.

During the past 18 years, President Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic
Front government has been widely credited with rebuilding a country in
ruins and restoring some form of normalcy. Since 2001, it has tried more
than 1.2 million genocide-related cases before community courts known
as gacaca. But it's also a country where questioning the official
version of the genocide has been criminalized, opposition party leaders
are jailed and attacked, and Kagame won the last two elections with more
than 90 percent of the vote against no real opposition. The government
has blocked the international prosecution of its own members for revenge
killings.

During last year's trial of Lazare Kobagaya, an 84-year-old
asylum-seeker in Kansas accused of charges similar to those against
Munyenyezi, the jury deadlocked on one immigration fraud charge and
convicted on a lesser charge. That conviction was dismissed after
prosecutors acknowledged failing to share exculpatory evidence with the
defense. Jurors in that case, which involved more than 80 witnesses and
$1 million in costs, told The Associated Press that they unanimously
rejected the genocide allegations, which were largely based on the
testimony of Rwandans — even though most of them believed that Kobagaya
had lied on his immigration paperwork.

Kobagaya had been reported by the Rwandan government to U.S. authorities
after he testified via video for a Rwandan genocide defendant on trial
in Finland, said Kurt Kerns, a Kansas lawyer who defended him. "We
learned if you become a defense witness, you do so at your own risk," he
said. "Nothing comes out of Rwanda without the Rwandan government's
say-so. If the Rwandan government has a particular interest in
prosecuting someone, they'll find the witnesses to say so."

Similarly, Leopold Munyakazi, a Rwandan exile and professor at Goucher
College in Maryland, found himself accused of genocide by the Rwandan
government and under investigation for immigration violations soon after
claiming in a 2006 speech that the events in 1994 were not genocide but
"fratricide."

Claims that the Rwandan government is using genocide accusations to
silence defense witnesses or political opponents has been a common
defense before the international tribunal and within Rwanda itself. A
2011 Human Rights Watch report on the community genocide courts found
that "some defense witnesses were afraid to testify for fear of being
accused of genocide themselves, and there were numerous allegations that
gacaca courts sacrificed the truth to satisfy political interests."

Said Carina Tertsakian, a senior Rwanda researcher at Human Rights
Watch: "It's a government that controls people very well and that has a
strategy and knows quite well how to get what it wants. If it decides
that it really wants this particular woman to be found guilty or sent
back to Rwanda, it can quite easily find ways of rustling up witnesses
and sending them over."

Balancing such doubts with the need to bring to justice to perpetrators
is not likely to get easier. "Did she or didn't she? That's the
million-dollar question," said Thomson, the Hampshire College
researcher. "I wouldn't be surprised if she did. And I wouldn't be
surprised if she didn't. But there's no way to know.""

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